Category Archives: politics

Mr. Zinke said he had little interest in the governor’s job, and believed his next step would involve floating down a lot of rivers, learning how fly-fish better, and “being helpful to groom and advise the next generation of conservationists.”

Jack Begg contributed research.

Follow Julie Turkewitz on Twitter @julieturkewitz.

There seems to be a lack of consistent principles behind Mr. Zinke’s DOE strategy.

has awarded a decommissioning contract to ZerKon, a consortium of GNS Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service, Westinghouse Electric Germany and Westinghouse Electric Sweden. The contract covers the dismantling and packaging of reactor pressure vessel internals in six nuclear power plants that are scheduled for dismantling.

“The shipment of transuranic wastes from generator sites to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico is set to resume in April. The US Department of Energy (DoE) expects a total of 128 shipments to be made to WIPP over the next 12 months.”

​Yesterday, The Hill reported that President-elect Trump’s budget blueprint would eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with the goal of reducing federal spending by trillions over the next decade. The budget blueprint itself has not yet been produced and would be a non-binding document. We are at the very beginning of the federal appropriations process. We do not expect the President’s budget to be released until April. The House and Senate will each soon begin work on the annual appropriations process. Each chamber must pass its own spending bills and then come to agreement on spending for the year before sending bills to the president to be signed into law. Fortunately, there is a solid foundation of bipartisan arts advocacy and support over the years.

“The bill would codify into federal law the 1994 Bay Delta Accord, an agreement between state and federal authorities to coordinate water use and quality standards for water in the California Delta, where the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers enters Suisun Bay and flows toward the Pacific Ocean. Making the accord a federal law would restore water deliveries to Central California users that were “cut off by environmental lawsuits and a series of illogical regulations,” Valadao says in the bill’s summary.”

Stream lining dam project process good for farmers but what about the environment?